(93 total)

What exactly should be done for freedmen, if anything, was hotly debated in the years following the Civil War. As this exchange between a Union military officer and a former slave in Arkansas shows, even the meaning of freedom was up for grabs.

Mary Church Terrell was one of the first African-American women to complete a college degree. Terrell, an educator and activist, also founded the National Association of Colored Women. The National Association was organized into many local chapters. Members founded kindergartens, orphanages and boarding houses and schools where young women could…

The most influential public critique of Booker T. Washington’s policy of racial accommodation and gradualism came in 1903 when black leader and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois published an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” DuBois rejected Washington’s…

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the conclusion of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Delivered in the rhetorical tradition of the African-American church, the speech is hailed as a masterpiece, epitomizing King's eloquent and powerful…

In this forward to Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South 1940-1980, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham sketches an outline of the contributions of African Americans from the Northeast, West Coast and Midwest in shaping the Civil Rights Movement. She questions many of the assumptions of previous scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement,…

Pauli Murray entered law school in 1941 with the "single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow." Murray and her peers, though on the frontlines of civil rights demonstrations and behind the scenes of many organizational meetings since the 1940s, had grown disenchanted with their exclusion from the Movement's leadership. Especially humiliating…

This photograph shows some of the leaders of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28,1963. The group includes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., front row, second from left and A. Philip Randolph, second from the right. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech during the march's dramatic climax in front of the Lincoln…

This page appeared in a flier calling Americans to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Elsewhere in the flier, march organizers called generally "to restore economic freedom to all in this nation; to blot out once and for all the scourge of racial discrimination" and urged "the time is NOW." The march was…

John Lewis, the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) drafted the speech excerpted below for the 1963 March on Washington. When copies of the speech were circulated in advance, march organizers, as well as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, objected to his strong rhetoric and criticisms of the federal…

In this oral history Bayard Rustin offers his opinion about why the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963, was a success. Rustin was an organizer of the march along with many others, including A. Philip Randolph, an African-American labor leader. Randolph had also organized the March on Washington Movement in 1941 which,…